of culture

when I was little more than childmy sister a teenager
we owned a reel-to-reel recorder
a brown quarter inch of plastic
fed from one reel through a channel
of pressing heads and circling rollers to the other

push both buttons down when you’re ready to record

my sister I believe has cultured me
from that young day to this
from the moment the microphone was applied up close
to the speaker of the radio
gathering disc jockeys and the songs they played
the pause button cutting out advertisements and banter

please don’t go near the lounge and don’t make a noise the taping has started

we played that first reel for month on month
until we knew the songs by heart
listening for hours save only those few minutes
when the tape required re-winding and re-feeding
then to start again with those familiar opening chords

today I heard a song played on golden-good-times-radio
so familiar that I sang it through and hardly missed a word
I knew the song that should have followed next
and the one that ought to have gone before
for there is an order to these things
established in 1969 when I was on the cusp of thirteen
and my sister ran the reel-to-reel that cultured me